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January 1 – January 6, 2019

Tiny Satellites Could Be “Guide Stars” For Huge Next-Generation Telescopes

In the coming decades, massive segmented space telescopes may be launched to peer even closer in on far-out exoplanets and their atmospheres. To keep these mega-scopes stable, MIT researchers say that small satellites can follow along, and act as “guide stars,” by pointing a laser back at a telescope to calibrate the system, to produce better, more accurate images of distant worlds. Image Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT

January 6, 2019 – There are more than 3,900 confirmed planets beyond our solar system. Most of them have been detected because of their “transits” — instances when a planet crosses its star, momentarily blocking its light. These dips in starlight can tell astronomers a bit about a planet’s size and its distance from its star. Read More

January 6, 2019 – Boom Supersonic, the Colorado company building a radically faster commercial aircraft, announced that it has closed a $100 million Series B investment round, bringing total funding to over $141 million. Investors, led by Emerson Collective, include Y Combinator Continuity, Caffeinated Capital, and SV Angel as well as founders and early backers of transformative companies like Google, Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. The proceeds of Boom’s Series B round, which include $56 million in new investment as well as previously-announced strategic investments, allow the company to advance the development of its Mach-2.2 commercial airliner called Overture. Read More

NASA’s New Horizons Mission Reveals Entirely New Kind Of World

This image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is the most detailed of Ultima Thule returned so far by the New Horizons spacecraft. It was taken at 5:01 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, just 30 minutes before closest approach from a range of 18,000 miles (28,000 kilometers), with an original scale of 459 feet (140 meters) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

January 2, 2019 – Scientists from NASA’s New Horizons mission released the first detailed images of the most distant object ever explored — the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Its remarkable appearance, unlike anything we’ve seen before, illuminates the processes that built the planets four and a half billion years ago. Read More

New Horizons Successfully Explores Ultima Thule

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons’ high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist’s impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima’s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

January 2, 2018 – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year’s Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system. Read More

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Enters Close Orbit Around Bennu, Breaking Record

Image Credit: Heather Roper/University of Arizona

January 2, 2019 – At 12:43 p.m. MST on December 31, while many on Earth prepared to welcome the New Year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, 70 million miles (110 million kilometers) away, carried out a single, eight-second burn of its thrusters – and broke a space exploration record. The spacecraft entered into orbit around the asteroid Bennu, and made Bennu the smallest object ever to be orbited by a spacecraft. Read More

Juno Mission Captures Images Of Volcanic Plumes On Jupiter’s Moon Io

JunoCam acquired three images of Io prior to when it entered eclipse, all showing a volcanic plume illuminated beyond the terminator. The image shown here, reconstructed from red, blue and green filter images, was acquired at 12:20 (UTC) on Dec. 21, 2018. The Juno spacecraft was approximately 300,000 km from Io. Image Credit: NASA/SwRI/MSSS

January 2, 2019 – A team of space scientists has captured new images of a volcanic plume on Jupiter’s moon Io during the Juno mission’s 17th flyby of the gas giant. On December 21, during winter solstice, four of Juno’s cameras captured images of the Jovian moon Io, the most volcanic body in our solar system. JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU), the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVS) observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of the moon’s polar regions as well as evidence of an active eruption. Read More

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Chasing New Horizons is the story of the men and women behind the amazing New Horizons mission to Pluto and the upcoming New Year encounter with Ultima Thule. Told from the perspective of mission leader Dr. Alan Stern and a dedicated team of scientists, this book gives a rare behind-the-scenes look at how an idea becomes a NASA mission, and the excitement of exploring new worlds.

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